Free podcasts featuring University faculty and distinguished visitors to Yale speaking on a wide range of topics are now available through Apple's iTunes.

Among the Yale faculty featured on the University's initial collection of podcasts are art historian Vincent Scully, political scientist Ian Shapiro, historian John Gaddis, skin cancer expert Dr. David Leffell, Peabody Museum director Michael Donoghue, geneticist Tian Xu and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient Lisa Curran. Visitors to Yale featured on podcasts include former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and alumnus Bob Woodward, the award-winning political journalist.

Apple's iTunes U is creating learning spaces -"what we used to call the
classroom,” says Patty Lins, director of educational technology and online learning. “You can listen to a lecture on a treadmill, in
your car, on the bus to an away hockey game . . .and Michigan Technological University is part of it in a big way. Students—and anyone else, for that matter—can download Robert Nemiroff’s introductory astronomy course along with the latest Smashing Pumpkins album. The difference is, you don’t have to pay a dime to learn the basics of cosmology, whereas “Zeitgeist” will cost you $11.99."

• An ambitious group of students at MIT have retrofitted a Porsche 914 with lithium-ion batteries to test the practicality of electric cars. The students removed the car’s original gas engine and replaced it with an electric motor that runs on 12 of these types of batteries. They estimate the Porsche to have a maximum speed between 70 and 100 miles per hour and that it will be able to run for up to 100 miles before needing to be recharged. Read more

• Scientists at Stanford University have conducted the first supercomputer simulations of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) pair, a new type of structure that can be from a hundred to a few thousand light years wide and from a few hundred million to a billion solar masses. Read more

Robert Frost wrote that "the only way out, is through." Seth Godin, the legendary Web marketing guru and author of Cow and Small is the New Big, has written another bestseller, The Dip -A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick) that applies the heart of Frost's message to succeeeding in life. The wisdom Seth offers can be summed up by quoting his epilogue:

"All our successes are the same. All our failures too. We succeed when we do something remarkable. We fail when we give up too soon. We succeed when we are the best in the world at what we do. We fail when we we get distracted by tasks we don't have the guts to quit."

Here's Seth's list [edited] of people and companies that are "the best in the world" - who have thrived because they successfully navigated "the dip," something each of us have, or will, encounter: Starbucks, iPod, Jackson Pollock, Allison Sweet, Paychex, Sotheby's Porsche, Barry Diller,